Chapter 103: Rest.

Chapter 103

The heavy carved doors of the master suite groaned on their hinges, the sound echoing around the empty room as Lucian kicked them open.

He didn’t bother to look back at Clara, though the persistent, frantic click of her shoes against the polished marble floor told him she was right behind him, her breathing coming in shallow hitches that nearly matched his own.

The mansion around them was unnervingly silent, a hollow tomb of stone and secrets that felt far too large for the four souls currently inhabiting it.

Lucian crossed the room, the dimmed bulb overhead casting long shadows that danced across the walls.

With a tenderness that seemed entirely at odds with his shredded, blood-soaked cloth and the drying smear of gore on his pale skin, he lowered Isabella onto the silk sheets.

The bed seemed too big now, swallowing her small form. In her human state, stripped of the celestial, gold-threaded fur and the towering, earth-shaking height of the Lycan, she looked heartbreakingly fragile—a delicate porcelain doll dropped carelessly into a den of ancient, starving monsters.

“Lucian, you’re swaying,” Clara whispered, her voice tight with a mixture of fear and concern.

She reached out, her fingers brushing his arm to steady him as he nearly tipped forward, his equilibrium shattered by the sheer drain of his essence.

“I’m fine,” he snapped even. though his knees felt like water. He didn’t pull away from her support, but his focus never wavered.

He grabbed the heavy, black-red velvet quilt at the foot of the bed and draped it over Isabella’s limp body, meticulously tucking the edges around her shoulders as if to seal her away from the horrors they had just escaped.

He lingered there for a long, heavy second, his hand hovering just above her pulse point. It was steady.

Strong. A thrumming of life that defied the deathly silence of the room. “Lucian, please sleep. Take a bit of rest too,” Clara insisted, her eyes wide as she took in the gray pallor of his skin.

Lucian didn’t answer immediately. He simply sank into the high-backed velvet chair beside the bed, his legs finally giving out under the combined weight of his exhaustion.

“The last time I rested, it took me thousands of years to wake,” he rasped, the weight of his centuries pressing into the small, dimly lit room like a physical burden.

Clara flinched at the biting coldness in his voice. She opened her mouth to argue, to tell him that a Sovereign who could barely sit upright was a Sovereign who couldn’t protect anyone, but the look in his crimson eyes—half-dead and burning with a primal, territorial fire—silenced her.

He wasn’t looking at her anyway; he was staring at Isabella’s hand where it peeked out from under the quilt, his fingers twitching as if he desperately wanted to reach out, yet feared that even the ghost of his touch might break the fragile spell of her recovery.

“Fine,” Clara whispered, her shoulders dropping in defeat. “Don’t sleep. But at least let me bring you some blood. Your skin is turning the color of ash, Lucian. You’ve given too much of yourself today. You’re empty.”

“Later,” he rasped. His throat was a desert, parched and screaming for the metallic sweetness of life.

He needed blood—he craved it with a hunger that made his fangs ache—but he didn’t want the stale offerings of a human or the cold draughts from a glass.

He wanted hers. He wanted the fire-laced blood of his mate, the only thing that could truly knit his soul back together.

But Isabella was currently a shattered vessel, her spirit unstable and her body exhausted, and he would rather starve than take a single drop from her in this state.

The silence that followed was thick and suffocating, broken only by the shallow breathing of the girl on the bed.

Lucian leaned his head back against the velvet of the chair, his body screaming for the very rest he refused to grant it.

He watched the way a single stray lock of her hair—now back to its dark, human state, no longer shimmering with the moonlight of the Lycan—rested against her cheek.

As he watched her, his hand drifted upward, his fingers tracing the smooth, healed skin on his own chest where the beast had struck him.

Even though the wounds had closed, he could still feel the sensation of those ivory claws tearing through his muscle.

It wasn’t just the physical memory of the pain that haunted him. It was the memory of the golden fire in her eyes.

He had spent his entire existence being the thing that people feared in the dark, the apex predator that crushed anything in its path, and yet, in that folding dimension, he had looked into the face of a forgotten god and found it beautiful even as it tried to end him.

“She moves,” Clara breathed, her voice a mere puff of air as she stepped closer to the edge of the bed.

Isabella’s fingers twitched against the silk, clutching at the air as if searching for a phantom limb.

A small, pained furrow appeared between her brows, her head turning restlessly against the pillow as she fought off whatever dreams were haunting her.

A soft, broken sound escaped her throat—not a growl of the beast, not a roar of the predator, but a small, heart-wrenching whimper that sounded like a child lost in a dark, infinite woods.

“Lucian…” she murmured in her sleep, her voice paper-thin and trembling. Lucian was leaning forward before he even realized he had moved, the chair creaking under his sudden shift in weight.

His hand finally closed over hers, his cold fingers anchoring her to the present. Her skin was still unnaturally warm, a lingering, simmering heat from the Lycan’s furnace that felt like it was trying to burn him.

“I’m here,” he said. Isabella’s eyes didn’t snap open. Her dark lashes only fluttered for a moment, and a brief flicker of recognition seemed to pass behind her eyelids, but the weight of the transformation was a heavy tide.

With a soft sigh, she drifted back down, her body going limp as she went back unconscious, lost once more to the deep, healing darkness of a sleep she desperately needed.

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